The Senate homeland security committee plans to hold hearings this summer on the Bush administration's handling of offers of foreign aid after Hurricane Katrina, senators said yesterday.

ISLE DE JEAN CHARLES, La. -- Over two centuries, engineers have restrained the Mississippi River's natural urge to wriggle disastrously out of its banks by building hundreds of miles of levees that work today like a riverine straitjacket.

NEW ORLEANS, April 28 -- The Rev. Jesse L. Jackson and Mayor C. Ray Nagin (D) led hundreds of marchers Saturday to the crumbling houses that still dominate the Lower Ninth Ward to draw attention to the area's slow recovery from Hurricane Katrina.

As the winds and water of Hurricane Katrina were receding, presidential confidante Karen Hughes sent a cable from her State Department office to U.S. ambassadors worldwide.

The Bush administration said yesterday that it will extend housing aid through March 2009 for hundreds of thousands of Gulf Coast residents displaced by hurricanes Katrina and Rita, a blanket expansion that more than doubles the amount of aid typically received by evacuees after a major disaster.

The Federal Emergency Management Agency yesterday more than doubled its estimate of the number of prepared meals lost during the 2006 hurricane season because of storage problems to 13.4 million, up from the 6 million it reported earlier.

As many as 6 million prepared meals stockpiled near potential victims of the 2006 hurricane season spoiled in the Gulf Coast heat last summer when the Federal Emergency Management Agency ran short of warehouse and refrigeration space, according to agency officials.

NEW ORLEANS -- The following report was written by Howard University student journalists who traveled to New Orleans last month with classmates helping to rebuild the hurricane-damaged city.

During the 12 years that Republicans ran the House, their leaders didn't pay much attention to affordable-housing activists. Despite soaring rents and complaints of a deepening affordability crisis, House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) told his conference that he didn't want to see housing bills...